Abstract
Design centered on sustainability is gaining global momentum, requiring designers to cultivate comprehensive and integrative thinking. This trend has also reshaped design education, where instructional guidance plays a vital role in fostering students’ deeper understanding of sustainability. This study adopts Integral Sustainable Design (ISD) as both a theoretical foundation and an analytical tool to examine student upcycling projects and identify key elements for cultivating sustainability, with the aim of proposing teaching strategies for upcycling education. Through in-depth interviews with three upcycling experts and the analysis of ten student works, key elements for cultivating sustainability in upcycling were derived using grounded theory, and an ISD-2D visualization framework was constructed to map the students’ projects. Findings reveal that students are generally more familiar with the behaviors dimension, focusing on material reuse and process operation. However, integrating personal experience, cultural values, and systemic thinking enables them to gradually develop integrative design capabilities and deeper sustainability awareness. This study proposes teaching strategies grounded in the four ISD quadrants, emphasizing their interconnections and cyclical guidance. These strategies provide practical references for educators to cultivate holistic sustainable thinking and support the creation of upcycling designs that embody integral sustainability.
Keywords
Integral Sustainable Design; Upcycling; Teaching Strategy
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.204
Citation
Lai, X., Cheng, Y.G.,and Tu, J.(2025) Fostering Integral Sustainable Design Thinking: A Teaching Strategy for Upcycling Practice, in Chang, C.-Y., and Hsu, Y. (eds.), IASDR 2025: Design Next, 02-05 December, Taiwan. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.204
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Track 12 - Design Education
Fostering Integral Sustainable Design Thinking: A Teaching Strategy for Upcycling Practice
Design centered on sustainability is gaining global momentum, requiring designers to cultivate comprehensive and integrative thinking. This trend has also reshaped design education, where instructional guidance plays a vital role in fostering students’ deeper understanding of sustainability. This study adopts Integral Sustainable Design (ISD) as both a theoretical foundation and an analytical tool to examine student upcycling projects and identify key elements for cultivating sustainability, with the aim of proposing teaching strategies for upcycling education. Through in-depth interviews with three upcycling experts and the analysis of ten student works, key elements for cultivating sustainability in upcycling were derived using grounded theory, and an ISD-2D visualization framework was constructed to map the students’ projects. Findings reveal that students are generally more familiar with the behaviors dimension, focusing on material reuse and process operation. However, integrating personal experience, cultural values, and systemic thinking enables them to gradually develop integrative design capabilities and deeper sustainability awareness. This study proposes teaching strategies grounded in the four ISD quadrants, emphasizing their interconnections and cyclical guidance. These strategies provide practical references for educators to cultivate holistic sustainable thinking and support the creation of upcycling designs that embody integral sustainability.